Acer aspire 5720 lots of problems

[j3rry]

ive used many distros on my desktop pc, and installed many distros on other computers
but on my laptop 9/10 linux distributions are garanteed not to boot

many of the problems i came across was a kernel panic at boot and i had to stream another kernel with patched drivers onto the cd in order to get it working
also all distributions ive tried cannot be booted after install, for some reason grub doesnt work and lilo does work
also atm im booting a gentoo installation from my windows partetition i have the kernel installed on my ntfs drive and use grldr to load the kernel

so yesterday i decided to give fedora 8 a try

and boy was i surprised, it ran out of the box, no hangup during boot/hardware detection
my wireless card was detected and worked fine only later i did stumbled on 2 major problems

1) my sound doesnt work, even tho it recognized the driver and loaded it
2) when i plug in my wireless wusb54gc usb stick from linksys the complete system hangs

my specs:

Mobile intel GM965/PM965 express chipset
Intel Core 2 duo cpu @ 1.66Ghz
Intel PRO/Wireless 3945 a/b/g
ATI mobility radeon HD2300
Intel high definition audio
richoh card reader buidin

when playing audio it doesnt generate any errors in dmesg, also in the logs in /root
is no trace of errors, ive also checked my headphone plug if there was any audio beeing played

ive fizzeled a bit with the soundmixer to check if a channel was muted but no results

this is the last time i buy an Acer, this is the most linux-unfriendly computer ive had in years no doubth about it

if anyone got fedora 8 working on his 5720 laptop can u please tell me your version bios, mine is 1.07

and would a bios update fix some of these issues ?

[Jonnaleth]

I also have an Acer Aspire 5720 with Fedora 8

I had the same problem with sound. To fix this as root i did the following:

open with an editor the /etc/modprobe.conf
and make sure you have the following line exactly as it is (if not at all add it at the end of the file)

options snd-hda-intel index=0 model=acer

For the usb i can't help you much although i have a similar problem:
When i login and the network-manager starts immediately and tries to connect to the default wireless network then the systems hangs and the capslock button blinks (kernel panic)

does anyone know if there is any solution to this?

[scottro]

I've found the USB stick in question to work out of the box with an Acer 4720z. I wonder if the problem is with NetworkManager.
Perhaps you could try starting in runlevel 3, turning off NetworkManager at boot and seeing if it will work with wpa_supplicant (if using WPA or WPA2 encryption) or iwconfig if it's WEP encryption. I think the stick will probably work.
As for sound, in Fedora, I'm not sure if it has a modprobe.conf. I created the file /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base, putting that option line in there, and it worked as advertised, enabling sound to work.

[Jonnaleth]

ok... i decided to make an update today of all the packages that were sugested... also updated from kernel 2.6.23.15-137 - 2.6.24.3-34

Everything worked fine after the update except the #$@$@#% wireless crap.
It doesn't seem to even recognize the card at boot.

As i previously described everything worked fine with the wireless except some kernel panics when i had used it right after login...
I had also updated my kernel in the past without any problems, although it wasn't such a major change in kernel version as now

any advices??

ps: can't really see if the wireless card works with the old kernel because i have no X server cause of the nvidia module being replaced by the knew ones for the new kernel... :

EDIT: After i run:
>dmesg | grep iwl3945 i got the following...
iwl3945: Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 3945ABG/BG Network Connection driver for Linux, 1.2.26kds
iwl3945: Copyright(c) 2003-2008 Intel Corporation
iwl3945: Detected Intel Wireless WiFi Link 3945BG
iwl3945: Tunable channels: 13 802.11bg, 0 802.11a channels
[<f8a49a01>] iwl3945_pci_probe+0x1293/0x1393 [iwl3945]
[<f8981030>] iwl3945_init+0x30/0x74 [iwl3945]
iwl3945: Failed to register network device (error -22)
iwl3945: probe of 0000:06:00.0 failed with error -22


any ideas??

[ethan1701]

That one line you offered was all that stood between me and an aspire 5720 with sound.

-Ethan

[Jonnaleth]

Well about the previous error where it didn't detect the wifi card...
After making another update to various packages (i think kmod_acer_acpi may have played some role, or new kernel modules) and the new kernel 2.6.24.3-50.fc8 everything is back to normal, fedora run realy smoothly now but next time i ll think about it if i will update anything... if everything works fine why update